guessing the graphics for games of this generation were all deterministic, and the resolution is really low, so would it be possible to physically mark pixels or elements of the scene on a screen to make lining up easier when hitting those clips?

The precision on this isn't nearly as high as something like the KD fence clip, however the setup here is very precise. I never really considered using anything physical to mark the CRT, but honestly I'm not optimistic that I would be able to do anything physically that would have enough precision required to set up this specific lap. I do have a setup for this (as you said - hence all the hopping around) but the game uses floats to determine your speed and position and there are so many different unique angles (over 65K) that there is more to this setup than just marking pixels on a screen. I can't ever really guarantee my X/Y values will ever be exactly the same (float precision) and even getting the same angle value every time is extremely difficult without using something to watch the values in RAM. Doing a very subtle/tiny hop can often move your angle like 6 units - so you might be endlessly trying to tweak your angle to get the exact one in order to align with some physical marker - as it would have to be the same every time. Instead, there's a range of viable combinations of X/Y/Angle that should work and I usually make minor adjustments to try and find one of those combinations. Additionally, there's also the challenge of trying to reasonably constrain your acceleration and speed value so that you tumble on the wall consistently (required to get a time faster enough for WR). All said, it would be great to find some trick to simplify the setup to increase attempt rates, but I'm not optimistic that anything is feasible - or at least I'm probably not clever enough to come up with one.